Building our Dream House

I’ve decided to create a new blog…to separate wedding stuff from the home stuff. Go check it out!!!

Ben & Mimi’s Dream House

 

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holy smokes, we did it!!

On Sunday, it was time to get down to business & finish the one room in the house we have been working on since July of this year: the dining room!!

Remember when it was all about the chair molding back in August of this year? Then it was all about the oh so tacky wallpaper? Then we worked on the spackling numerous times throughout the following months — like here? After that, we worked on the sanding. Finally we got around to priming the walls, which has led us to this point in the long-winded story of home renovations.

Today, I am proud to announce that we have finished painting the room!!!!

Here is the paint that we had picked out a long time ago. I bought a sample of it & immediately loved the way it looked. Shortly after, I bought the gallon of paint that we needed to complete the room.

I wanted matte paint as opposed to glossy, because matte would be a little more forgiving. Even after the drywall & sanding, there was still a lot of imperfections on the wall. I didn’t want the paint to enhance those flaws but rather hide them. Matte is made to do that.

The paint looks kind of light in the picture, but it’s not like that in reality.

Ben started painting the W’s while I worked on the edges.

It didn’t take him long to cover up the wall, but I would have to go back & fill in all of the little cracks & spots of white poking through the paint that Ben seemed to swear weren’t really there.

While Ben did the harder job (in order to work on building more muscles), I tested out my new tool:

It helps give an even line where the wall meets the trim without having to use painter’s tape. I was soo excited to give this a whirl, & what do you know…

IT WORKS!!! I was lovin’ it & so was Ben. The cool thing too is that the trimmer (what I have deemed this magical tool to be called) has removeable paint pads. So once the bristles have worn down, you just throw it out, wash the red holder, & put on a new one. The pads are very inexpensive too, which is a huge PLUS!

In no time, we had the majority of the walls covered in paint.

The photos really don’t do the color justice, so one day (after the house is more presentable) ya’ll just have to come over & see it in person.

On one of the walls, I got bored & decided to use the trimmer as a stamp. First, it was only to get off the extra paint lingering on & between the bristles, but then I decided to stamp more of the wall.

After a couple of minutes, I showed it to Ben, joking about leaving it like that — 6 sections of the room fully painted & 1 sponged/stamped — but ultimately going to paint it over after I had my fun. What do ya’ll think? Here’s a close-up:

Ben said that he liked it & wanted to leave the wall like that. It has a very edgy, modern feel to it. It’s all about shapes.

Since I haven’t really decided if I really love it or not, we are going to leave it like this for now. I ended up painting a design around the part where the rectangular stamps meet the painted wall.

If it doesn’t grow on me over my vacation, we’ll paint it over. But I love the idea that we can paint the walls however we want!!

Here is how the room looks after the proper two counts of paint & a round of touch-ups.

We decided not to paint the window & door trims just yet. I want to paint it a different color, but haven’t decided on it just yet. We did however end up painting the baseboard.

After a couple of hours, we were completely finished!!!

Well, finished with the painting. Next thing we needed to do was go pick out some new outlet covers. The ones that were on there were pretty bad. See for yourselves.

They were so bad that we didn’t even card to cover up the entire thing when we painted. You can see that someone had already gone over the outlet with white paint instead of taking them off during the painting process. We just covered up the holes with tape & painted right on over.

This past Tuesday, we stopped by Lowe’s & picked up some nice chrome (or chrome-looking) covers.

We bought a value pack with 6 outlet covers, one light switch cover, & then a dimmer (because this room had a dimmer knob, not just a switch. It’s more eco-friendly. Whoop! Whoop!).

We tested out this chrome cover on the dimmer first, to make sure we really liked the look before we went & recovered all of the outlets. I forgot to take a before picture, but here’s the after:

Sorry the pictures are somewhat blurry. Using the flash wouldn’t have made the pictures turn out any better. So you’ll just have to take me on my word: the chrome look totally works with the new wall color!! (Just like I knew it would. lol.)

It didn’t take us long at all to remove the rest of the outlet covers, touch-up the paint around it, & replace them with our newest home purchases.

Of course, I didn’t realize that the outlet cover & outlets themselves were two separate entities. Silly me. So this is how the outlets look:

(sorry for the blurriness)

Although I’m bummed that it’s not completely chrome, I think I can deal with this. How many people really analyze the outlets when they come over to somebody’s house? As long as they function, I’m happy. Also, the fact that each outlet costs about $5-$7 a pop deterred me from heading back to Lowe’s to buy them.

I’m just soooooooo happy that this room is complete, & it couldn’t have happened at a better time since Ben & I will both be gone on vacation the next two weeks!!! Ya’ll do not know how much grief this one room has caused me, but now I can finally put it behind me….well, almost.

In January, we plan on pulling out the carpet & installing a hardwood floor or faux hardwood (whatever is cheaper). After doing that, then painting the trim, buying a new dining room table, & refurbishing the dining room chairs (DIYing those suckers!!), the room will be complete!!!!

But for now, I am satisfied with having the walls painted.

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Optimus Prime!

Oh, I know that reference is so terribly silly, but I couldn’t help it! It was the first blog title that popped into my head, so I decided to stick with it.

On Tuesday, I didn’t have to go  into work at Christi’s so I had a day to catch up on some much needed projects, one in particular: the dining room in Ben’s (slash his parents’) house. The last thing done was sanding the drywall. This was like 3 weeks ago. But I’ve been so busy at Christi’s during the week & Ben’s been busy working on the weekends, that we just haven’t found overlappage in schedules. Bummer. But finally, Tuesday was free for both of us. We got down to work around 11 AM. First we had to wipe down the walls & all of the trimming to make sure that we got rid of all of the drywall dust floating around in the air. Here are pictures of how the room looked at the start of Tuesday…all sandy smooth.

Looks pretty ugg, huh?

Well, it won’t be looking like that for long.

There’s Ben, mid-project, looking as handsome as ever. Look at that wall behind him too. Pretty good, right?

A little over an hour later & one coat of primer, this is how the entire dining room looked:

As the pictures kind of show, the walls ain’t perfectly white. But it’s good enough. The paint we are using is the darkish purple we had picked out a long time ago, & that would easily cover up the slight whitish/eggshell-y imperfections that the primer didn’t quite cover completely.

And I don’t know if you can tell by the picture, but getting up close & personal with the wall pointed out a few more imperfections that need fixing. We’ll definitely need to focus on the baseboard, because it is quite scratched up. Also, all of the outlet covers & one light dimmer cover needs to be replaced. The previous paint job wasn’t very — how shall I put it nicely — neatly done. Whoever did it only put a small piece of tape over the outlet cover holes & not the entire outlet. So you could clearly see a distinction between the color of the wall/part of the outlet cover & the actual outlet cover’s original color (confusing!!). I wish I got a picture of it, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. It was some kinda awful.

Anyways, our goal is to try & get this room painted before we both leave for our Christmas trips next week! It would be so wonderful to celebrate finally accomplishing something: fixing up an entire room!! …well, practically. The trim is eventually going to be painted a different color (that I haven’t picked out yet) & the carpet will be removed & replaced with hardwood floor. But for now we are celebrating the little victories.

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could this project take any longer? yes. yes it can.

It’s been about a week since Ben & I have worked on the dining room. There are just so many steps involved, & the next few steps are the longest, most tedious, & dirtiest. But it was time to get down to business. Sunday night after evening service, Ben & I came back to his house in order to work on the dining room. It was the only time we could set aside to continue with the project, & I wasn’t about to put it off any longer. First thing we had to do was lay down two plastic drop cloths & tape down the edges.

This would make for easy cleanup after we finished spackling & then had to sand.

I won’t have to deal with vacuuming the carpet anymore. Thank goodness. Once was enough.

After taping up the entire carpet, it was time to sand a small part of the wall that had already been spackled. We wanted to make sure that the spackle would work & that none of the flaky cardboard would be poking through.

After some heavy sanding by my muscular fiance, I am happy to announce that the spackle would work!! It effectively covered up the blasted cardboard flakiness while providing an almost flawlessly smooth finish. Look at all of the sanding dust that was in the air!! We had to open a window, but didn’t need the fan quite yet.

We only sanded this little portion, but look at the dust that accumulated on the drop cloth!!It was a lot!! So glad we had the drop cloth, but this meant we had to be very careful. If we accidentally dropped anything onto the ground, a very fine but large cloud of vroomed up into the air & into our nostrils.It also made our feet very dirty. We had to wipe our feet once we left the room so we wouldn’t track sanding dust into any other rooms. Then Ben came up with the solution of wearing old (but not dirty) socks to keep our feet clean.

We would leave the socks at the entrance of the room. No more cleaning down our feet!Now that we knew the drywall would repair the wallpaper damages, it was time to finish spackling the entire upper half of the dining room wall minus the spots I had already spackled or were spackled by previous wall workers.

We spent about 1 1/2 hours spackling, but we weren’t half way done even though the bucket was almost empty. We were going to need more spackle. I didn’t like acknowledging the fact that we would have to spend even more money on this one room. But it must be done. I don’t like leaving projects like these unfinished. It will get done…sooner or later.

 

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just an ordinary week

I must admit that this week hasn’t provided much motivation to write about. Nothing really going on in terms of wedding stuff or house renovating stuff. Okay…well that’s a lie. There were a few things here & there, but nothing that couldn’t be squished all into one post. So here goes a short recap of my entire, non-interesting week:

MONDAY: (aka Labor Day)

I got a chance to get around to finishing up some more crafts at my ever-so increasing work station (aka the dining room).

I did not take a picture of the floor, but I can promise you there is a lot more stuff there.

After I had bought some more stem-clothed floral wire, I was able to make more paper flowers…this time playing around which more colors than just shades of green. I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to try blue & white. Anna the flower lady is going to be wearing a blue dress (probably a darker blue but we haven’t really discussed the specifics just yet), so I thought a blue bouquet would complement the outfit quite well. The only blue  crepe paper I had found was a light blue — you’ll see shortly — but I thought it would lighten the dark color of her dress.

I definitely love the bright colors. It’s too early to decide whether or not the white or blue flowers will actually be used, but now we have some available if we do need them.

After making enough blue & white flowers, I thought to myself, “It can’t hurt to make more green flowers.” So I did. My bunch has definitely grown.

What am I going to do with all of these green flowers, you might be wondering. I have no idea at this moment. I might hold a ginormous bouquet that spans the width of my waist. Or some might go into each bridesmaids bouquet. Or I might take half & use it as my tossing bouquet. I have a lot of choices right now, but eventually I’ll make a decision.

TUESDAY:

I subscribed to The Krazy Coupon Lady last week, & since then I’ve been able to know about all of these crazy FREE deals!! For example, The Krazy Coupon Lady gave me SEVEN promo codes to be used at the Blockbuster Kiosk (like a Redbox but this one is actually Blue. but not called a Bluebox) from Tuesday, September 6th – Friday, September 9th. This means I could get at least SEVEN DVD’s for FREE!!! Even more if I went back using a different credit card. I was definitely not passing up on this deal. I went & picked up three movies (I was saving the rest for the next day).

I got The Adjustment Bureau for my dad, Life as We Know It for me, & Soul Surfer for the entire family minus Jaja to watch.

Who doesn’t love free DVD rentals?!?! That was a special treat for us this week considering we don’t do Redbox anymore unless I receive a free text promo code. Saved $7.00 this week! Pretty darn good!!!

WEDNESDAY:

At 9 AM I had a testing session for a Duke Energy job that I had applied for. Going into work with my mom reminded me of Summer 2010 & Winter 2010 when I worked downtown & rode in with my mom everyday. I got done with testing around 11 AM but my mom had YMCA stuff until 1 PM. I was starving so I went to find myself something to eat. It wasn’t until I saw bagels that I realized I was craving them!

It wasn’t quite lunch yet, so I didn’t have to contend with the rush that would ensue in about an hour.

Thank you Einstein Brothers!!

I ordered my bagels & sat down to enjoy them.

Yumm!!

I have gotten over the fact that people probably stare at me when they see me taking pictures of the things that I do. Owell, I’ll do what I like!

Then the rest of the afternoon, I watched Life as We Know It with my mom before heading out to tutor my little cousin Isabella.

THURSDAY:

As soon as I woke up & ate some breakfast, I went over to Ben’s house in order to make more progress on the dining room. I laid down more spackle on the wall, but the flaky cardboard was becoming an issue. I was scared that once we sanded the wall, the flakes would still be able to show through & the wall still wouldn’t be smooth. So I used a hand sander to smooth the walls out as best as I could. Instead of wasting any more spackle, Ben & I decided that we would sand down the spackle we had already applied to see if it would be a good solution. If not, we didn’t waste an entire new bucket of spackle. If it ends up working, then the job will get done faster with two people. Win win.

But after the sanding, the floor & table was literally covered with a huge layer of cardboard dust. I was also covered. I went back later that night with our vacuum (because I don’t like Ben’s clunky one) in order to vacuum every centimeter of the floor after wiping down the walls, windows, & table. It looked so pristine afterwards. You could just feel the clean.

Here’s the part of the walls that I spackled. See the chandelier in the corner of the picture? Eventually, we will get around to updating pretty much all of the light fixtures in the house. I don’t like gold, so we will definitely have to find a silver or white/black  one. If they are too expensive, then I’ll probably just take this one down & spray paint it silver. My favorite home bloggers Young House Love do it all of the time, so how hard could it be? But that won’t be for a little while longer.

The table in the room is also going to be removed & replaced with something a little more square & updated.

This table is quite old & one of the legs is very unsecure. Once I tile my studio room & we find a good but cheap “new” dining room table, this old one will be moved into there. It’ll be a free-floating table in the center of the room where I can work on all my art stuff.

The dining room chairs have all migrated to the living room.

I plan on sanding (a very common theme when it come to home DIY projects) the wood & re-staining them. The I’ll reupholster the cushions. They are this ugly tan/beige color now…very blah. Once the dining room is painted, I’ll see what fabric color would go best, but I’m thinking something patterned & something bright!!!

All of these projects are to come so stay tuned.

In a couple of hours, it’ll be time to pick up Ben from the airport (YIPPEE!!!!) & then it’s off to work for the both of us!! Hope everybody else is having a wonderful weekend so far!

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Speckle Spackle

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

Ben picked me up early in the morning so we could try & make headway on the dining room walls. We got to his house & prepped the room by clearing out all of the chairs & stuff.

We left the table because it was too big & inconvenient to move, opened a window, & turned on a fan to blow some of the sanding dust outside.

We started sanding with this bad boy:

But even with an awesome sand-blaster (what I have decided to call it whether or not it’s the actual tool name is irrelevant), it didn’t take us but 10 minutes to realize the futility of it all. The sand-blaster was not smoothing out the wall as fast or as well as we wanted.

All it did was slough off more of the lighter top cardboard layer to revel more of the darker underlayer of cardboard. That would’ve been fine if the underlayer wasn’t so bumpy & flaky. HUGE SAD FACE!!!

There was one tiny spot on the other side of the wall where a sliver of the actual wall was revealed after I yanked the cardboard off. I tried to use the wallpaper remover gel. It worked!!! But…(there is always a but) in about 10 minutes, all I got done was this:

(the bottom white part is the lower half of the wall that was painted white apparently OVER the cardboard! Gah!!)

I could just picture myself spending days just working to get this cardboard off, & I didn’t want to do it. Finally, Ben put down the sand-blaster in defeat & said we should just drywall over the entire flaky cardboard instead of scraping over at it. I was willing to give this a try, especially since it meant I didn’t have to scrape at any more walls. I had purchased this small (but not the smallest size) bucket of Drywall/Spackle

with the intent of using it to cover up all of the nail holes & other holes in the walls around the house, which is why I only bought a bucket one size up from the smallest that they offered (which was pretty tiny). I’m just glad we had it on hand so we didn’t have to make another trip to Lowe’s. Ben decided that in order to not waste too much spackle, we would only apply some to a small area, wait, & then see if it’ll do the trick.

When it the spackle is wet, it’s a pink color. It turns white as it dries. I don’t know why it’s made that way, but I guess it really doesn’t matter. As long as it works!!!

Here’s a closer picture of the wall:

The bucket says you only have to wait 1-5 hours, but Ben said to give it a day or so. I just kept praying that this would be the answer to our problem.

Yesterday (Thursday), Ben checked out the dried spackle & said that with a little sanding, the wall would be smooth & practically like a new wall!! No one would ever be able to tell that underneath lurked a hideous layer of flaky cardboard permanently attached to the inner wall. Hallelujah!!!!!!

So next week, while Ben & Jon are in Minnesota, I’ll head on over to spackle the ENTIRE dining room wall!! Then I’ll prep the room for Ben to sand when he gets back, or maybe I’ll do it myself. So, summary, the dining room needs to be spackled, sanded, primed, then painted!!! I think I can manage that!

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pullin’ down some wall…..paper

(soooo behind on bloggin, so ya’ll must forgive me!)

Last week, after all of the chair molding was ripped from the walls by a very handsome man (lol), I went to work taking off the wall….paper. By the end, I wish I could’ve taken off the entire wall & started with a fresh new wall that had never been tarnished with wallpaper. But the past home owners were not privy to my wish & therefore did not grant it.

The top layer was quite easy to peel off. I did all of this:

in about 10-15 minutes. You can see that the floral wallpaper (aka the top layer) came off with no problem. But you see that tannish, eggshell color on the top half of the wall?? That is still part of the actual wallpaper. It is the bottom layer of the entire floral wallpaper. I thought it might be easier to peel it off layer by layer since it didn’t look like all of the layers wanted to come off at the same time.

Then I came to a spot where the top layer & bottom layer chose to not part ways. I ripped the piece off, & it revealed this:

Another layer of wallpaper underneath!!!! So….this meant that (as told by Ben) the previous owners of the house left up wallpaper which was then covered up by Ben’s parents. Just wonderful! This meant that I would have to peel off an entire other layer of darn wallpaper!! I was not happy. But, I actually didn’t mind the pattern of the underlying wallpaper. It was green, after all, & had a modern, linear pattern to it. I was playing with the idea of keeping that wallpaper there for a little while until, further into the peeling process, I noticed that this wallpaper didn’t cover the entire walls! I guess the wallpaper culprits (aka past home owners) ran out of wallpaper & just left an entire upper corner void of green wallpaper. Totally unnoticeable. Keeping the wallpaper idea was not going to fly anymore.

I just kept right on peeling. I didn’t mind because Phineas & Ferb kept me company. Here is a spot where the entire floral wallpaper & green retro wallpaper were inseparable & they all came off together.

This was when I realized that it was possible to cut this project time in half just by peeling all layers of paper off at the same time. Genius!!! I was definitely ready to not have to deal with wallpaper anymore!

Finally, not too long after, all of it was off!!!! But then I was left with this:

But what you see is not the actual wall wall. You can’t tell by the picture, but the brown splotches are cardboard pieces flaking off from “supposedly” the back layer of the green retro wallpaper. What?!?! It was pretty thick & didn’t look like it would be coming off without a fight. Those painted dots & line across the photo are where, according to Ben, somebody had put drywall & sanded down.

So bottom line is that we cannot really do anything more until we figure out how to remove the cardboard or flakies in order to get a smooth wall. But since we weren’t able to tackle that issue, we decided that we could at least figure out what kind of color we wanted the room.

After much discussion, we settled on the color purple. It’s a warm & inviting color — exactly the feelings we what to invoke when people gather in the dining room. Now comes the time to pick out what shade of purple. We taped some purple paint swatches that we were considering onto the wall in order to get a better idea of how that color would look on the wall.

I’m happy to announce that we did come to a conclusion which……………..will be announced in a later post!!

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no more mold? check!

Well, it’s probably not the kinda mold that first pops into your head, which should bring some relief. This mold is not hazardous to your health, so those of you who have spent any time in the house can breathe easy.

On Wednesday, after working on the wallpaper for about 2 1/2 hours, I woke Ben up from his nap so he could help me. While I continued scrape scrape scraping at the wallpaper in the living room, I got him to work on the dining room. (Oops, I just realized that I might’ve forgotten to snap a before picture. owell)

Before we could attempt at taking off the floral wallpaper lining the dining room, we needed to take off the chair molding (or it’s called something like that) that divided the walls upper & lower halves. The top half was wallpapered, but the bottom half was left white. These means only HALF THE WORK!…..right?? I certainly hope so, but I’m afraid to get my hopes up at this point.

I bought a small crowbar like tool made specifically for taking off molding. I got instructions from some Lowe’s employees, & I relayed them to Ben. I was confident that we (aka Ben) could do this.

After about 20 minutes or so, I came back to check on him. Ben was doing pretty well.

Half of the room had been de-molded.

Ben had started a good pile of trim. Thank goodness it was pretty simple to remove. Otherwise, it was possible that we couldn’t remove it at all. Something about nails in sheet rock or the underlying structure of the wall. I don’t remember exactly what the Lowe’s employee said.

Here’s a closer picture:

& here’s a picture of the other side of the dining room:I was so happy that Ben was able to finish this project other quickly so we could start tackling the bigger project of the week: that dastardly wallpaper!

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how nice the world would be without tacky wallpaper

Have you ever looked at a wall & wondered what that person was thinking when they shellacked it with glue & tacky wallpaper? When I was scanning old pictures from my parents, I saw the wallpaper we had in our old house, & I was super glad it did not tag along in the move to our new home. So happy my parents rethought the idea of putting more wallpaper in this house.

Don’t get me wrong, the new wallpaper designs that are coming out today are pretty cool. They are so modern. But I’m not a wallpaper kinda gal. I like using paint.

This week, Ben & I were able to tackle a project that has been annoying me for some time: the wallpaper adorning one wall in their living room & a different wallpaper in their dining room.

I first had to get rid of the one in the living room. Here is a picture of it (for you who have never been to Ben’s house):

What do ya’ll think?

It’s definitely a little bit of an eyesore. I get enough of the outdoors outside, I would rather not have it in my (future) house. Plus, it did not tie in with any of the other decor in the house much less the living room. It definitely had to go. Plus, the wallpaper is so dark, that it darkens the already pretty dark room.

Here are all of my supplies I got the day before:

(the half used bottle of DIF was found under their bathroom sink.)

Inventory (top left to right, bottom left to right): Piranha wallpaper remover, 1/2 DIF wallpaper remover, Piranha scoring tool, Piranha scraper, & a plastic drop cloth.

With all of my supplies laid out, I went right to work as Ben decided to take a nap. The instructions tell you that you must first “score” the wall with this tool:

You are supposed to lightly press it down & move it in a circular motion across the wallpaper. It scratches the paper without damaging the wall & allows the wallpaper spray remover to soak behind the paper rather than just sit on top.

I scored the entire wall & then sprayed the top right corner as a test corner. I waited the recommended 15-20 minutes before trying to scrape it off.

It came off okay, but as you can tell, some small pieces were still left behind. I would have to go back, spray some more, & scrape it off. As a perfectionist, I needed to get every single little speck of wallpaper off of that wall.

I sprayed another section, waited, & then scraped again.

At this point, I was tired of waiting & waiting, so I thought maybe I could skip that part. I would just spray & immediately scrape. (It shouldn’t be “shake & bake” anymore but rather “spray & scrape”). This actually worked!!! I was able to just spray a section, wait a couple of seconds, & then start scraping. It worked just as well, but made my job go by a lot faster.

about 10 minutes later:

As you can see, there are two layers to wallpaper. The top layer was a lot easier to peel off, but sometimes the back layer didn’t come off with it.

then another 15 minutes later:

It took me longer because I went back & scraped off the little pieces that were floating around. I told you I wouldn’t be able to stand seeing that up there for long.

& then finally….

The top half was completely stripped!! yippee!!!!!! The reason for this is, because the wallpaper was “hung” (?) in two halves: top & bottom. Doesn’t the room just look a lot brighter without that dark green wallpaper covering up the wall? Look at how full the trash bag is?! I know you probably can’t tell from the picture, but this trash bag is big enough to fit about two & a half of ME in it!! That’s how big it is!

More time passes & here’s what I got:

As I worked, I love listening to some of my favorite TV shows that are on Netflix. So during this entire time, I listened to Phineas and Ferb, Bones, & White Collar (this one wasn’t on Netflix).

& finally…(you thought this picture would never come)

ALL DONE!!!!! Whoop whoop!

You’ll have to take my word for this, but it just makes the room look so crisp & clean!! Removing the wallpaper to reveal the white wall definitely lightened up the room a TON!!! It just felt so much brighter, even though it’s still not as bright as I would like. That problem will be fixed with we get blinds instead of dark pink curtains & up the wattage of the light fixture. I have absolutely no regrets about removing the wallpaper. This was 5-6 hours well spent in my book!

Next post: onto the dining room we go!!

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